Perilous Adventures
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Hunted

Wayne Strudwick
 

Rabbit HunterRyan Wallace, seventeen years old and bone-thin in baggy clothes, hid behind fallen timber at the edge of the forest clearing. He rested the barrel of the .22 on a smooth groove in a piece of deadwood and watched the burrows scattered among the ripped earth and debris. Wagtails whistled in the branches above his head and, somewhere across the ridge, a sawmill-bound log truck knocked back gears on a sandy rise. He waited patiently, scanning the sunlit ground, and listened to the creatures waking and hustling in the scrub. He had an hour at best before dark.

After a while a pair of ears came up from the grass and Ryan lowered his eye to the scope. The rabbit moved tentatively out of the burrow, twitched its nose and raised itself up, testing the air for danger, and when its big frightened eye moved into the cross-hairs, Ryan shot it. He kept his eye to the lens while he worked the bolt for a second round but the rabbit lay still on its side, legs outstretched, white belly fur exposed. A good pelt, Ryan thought, and he picked up the spent shell and sniffed the cordite.  

He scratched at the zits buried in his chin whiskers and smiled—sharp little black teeth oddly spaced, some snapped off at the base like burnt stumps, gums blood red. Ryan only ever smiled out here in the scrub, away from the town, away from the people. It was the only place he felt happy, safe.

He shot two more rabbits and came up out of hiding to collect his catch. The hind legs of one of the rabbits still twitched in the dirt and Ryan picked it up and wrung its neck and then laced all three with a loop of wire pierced between bone and tendon and made his way back along the log track at a steady trot, gun slung over his shoulder, stock pressed against his hip to keep the weapon steady.  

His vehicle, a one tonne Datsun utility, was parked at the junction of the log track and the Number One Fire Break. When he arrived he tossed the rabbits in the back and took two traps from the toolbox bolted to the tray. He smeared the pressure plates with blood from the neck-wound of one of the rabbits and walked a short way back into the forest to set the traps in a small patch of sandy loam, spacing them two metres apart and driving the anchor pins deep into the soil. The metal jaws were sharp and stiff and he was careful not to set them off as he sprinkled leaves and twigs around the area for camouflage. He returned to the ute with night falling.

Ryan drove home along the Number One Break. The big wide road was like some ghostly freeway, eerie and bleached in the twilight, splicing the vast scrub to the horizon. There were sandbanks and ruts and bone-jarring corrugations, and kangaroos nibbling for feed in the table-drain raised their heads to gaze red-eyed into the lights. There was road-kill everywhere.    

He switched on the radio, wound the dial through the static, and looked at the fuel gauge nudging red on the dash. Eyes back on the road, and he saw the girl. She came like an apparition, up out of the dark forest, her face milk-white in the headlights, her bare arm waving for him to stop. Ryan jammed the brakes and the ute went sideways, righted, and stopped. He sat stiff in his seat and watched her in the mirror, jogging up to the ute in the glow of the taillights, dust barrelling around her. She tapped on the driver’s-side door and he rolled down the window. Her face, oddly calm, came close to his, and he could see the chafing of her lips and smell her perfume and sweat.

“Oh, you’re that Wallace kid,” she said.

Ryan said nothing, just looked at her, waiting for her to disappear.

She said, “Can you run me into Bara?”

Ryan was trying to remember her name. “What are you doing out in the scrub?” he said.

“Nothing. Listen, can you just run me into Bara?”

“Alright,” Ryan said, and he watched her walk round the front of the ute, dragging her finger through the dust on the bonnet. She wore cut-off jeans and a t-shirt and her dark shoulder-length hair was tangled in a tuft at the back (a bird’s nest, his mother would’ve called it). Tracey Driscoll. Yes, that was her name. How old was she now, nineteen, twenty? She must’ve been cold. She got in and shut the door, and Ryan started driving.

“There’s an oilskin under the seat if you want it,” Ryan said.

She inspected the jacket and put it back on the floor. “Brian, isn’t it?” she said.

“Ryan.”

“Ron?”

“Ry—an.”

“Right. Hey, listen Ryan, you got to, like, open your mouth when you speak,” she said, and wiped the foggy window with the back of her hand.

Ryan let his eyes move over her quickly. There were holes in her jean shorts and dark polish on her fingernails. He recalled the story about her, the story Rodney at the servo once told. How Tracey got knocked up in year eight; how she left school, had the kid and gave it to someone in Dubbo; how she came back, got knocked up again, then left school for good. Her name was all over the toilets—at the oval, at the pool, at the park.

“How come you’re out in the scrub?” Ryan said.

“I was just out here, alright.” She turned up the radio. “I love this song,” she said, and started singing along. Saxophones, synthesizers, and the bloke singer sounding like a girl. Ryan preferred country.

When the song finished she said, “So, why were you out here?”

“Shooting rabbits,” Ryan said slowly, trying to make the words clear.

“You eat them, don’t you?” she said.

He didn’t reply.

“That’s fucking gross,” she said.

Ryan looked at her. She was smiling. She put one foot up on the dash and played with her hair.

“Skins,” he said.

“Skins,” she said, mocking his voice. She turned the radio dial, found another song. “So, what, do you make clothes or something out of the skins?”

“Sell them,” Ryan said. “Fox skins, too. More money.”

“I’m sure you’re, like, loaded,” she said.

Ryan leant an arm on the doorframe and drove one handed. He remembered that in primary school she had won the Senior Girl Champion at the athletics carnival and she wore the medal around her neck for the rest of the term.

“Do you always drive this slow?” she said. She grabbed the oilskin and spread it over her legs.

“Saves juice,” Ryan said.

“Well, can you go faster?”

“No.”

“Okay, do you want to know what I was doing out in the scrub?”

“Not really.”

“I was with this guy,” she said.

They topped a rise. The lights of Baradine were in the distance.

“Drive faster and I’ll tell you more,” she said.

Ryan let the Datsun coast down the slope in neutral. Tracey was watching him, playing with her hair.

“Okay, so I was with this guy from Pillaga. He works at the sawmill, the Gwabegar mill. Wayne Baker? Wayney-bake? He plays football.”

“I don’t care,” Ryan said.

A Kenworth came up behind them, lights blazing. Ryan squinted in the rear-view mirror and watched the big log truck pull to the right to overtake. It came up beside them spraying dust and stone, swamping the ute in a roiling cloud, and then raced ahead, the trailer laden with a dozen massive ironbarks, fishtailing away into the night. The dust cleared and they hit the blacktop. Ryan said, “That’s my turnoff, but I’ll run you into Bara, drop you at the mainy.”

“Actually, can you take me on to Pillaga?”

“That’s eighty ks through the scrub. I haven’t got the juice.”

“Please?” she said, her voice high, whiny.

“Can’t do it,” Ryan said.

She unwound a hank of hair from her fingers and reached across to Ryan, touching him gently on the arm. “Please?” she said. “I could tell you about my day in the forest. I could tell you what he did to me.”

Ryan kept his eyes on the road. Her fingers felt cold on his skin.

She said, “I can tell you what I did to him.”

Ryan pulled his hand away. “I don’t give a shit about what you done out there.”

“Yes, you do, you asked me twice.”

“Yeah, but I don’t give a shit about what you done with no bloke.”

She folded her hands in her lap. A Jimmy Little song played on the radio and she struck out at the dial to silence it, and folded her hands again.

Ryan said, “I can drop you at the main drag, that’s all I can do. I don’t have the fuel to get to Pillaga and back.”

They went through the sixty zone, past a few worker’s cottages on the outskirts of town.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said.

Ryan nodded.

She put her hand across her mouth to suppress a laugh. “Okay, hang on,” she said.

Ryan looked at her. Light from a street lamp blazed over her skin and he saw dark welts on her arms and shoulders and a cut on her neck that had scabbed over. She was giggling. “What?” he said.

“Okay, are you, like, inbred?”

Ryan looked away. Her turned left at Rodney’s servo and drove towards the centre of town.

She said, “Isn’t your dad and grandad, like, the same guy?”

“Shut up.”

“Or is it your mum and dad, are they, like, brother and sister? This is just what I’ve heard.”

Ryan stopped the ute. Up ahead a dozen people milled around the entranceway to the Royal Hotel. “Both my parents are dead,” he said. “You can get out here.”

She got out and slammed the door. Ryan watched her walk along the footpath towards the pub. She was carrying his oilskin coat. He got out and called after her. “I need that back!” he said.

She turned around and dangled the jacket two-handed like a bullfighter. “Come and get it,” she said.

Ryan started after her and then stopped in the middle of the road. The people outside the pub were watching now. They were mostly young, some of them he remembered from school. “You’ve got to give back that oily,” he said. “You can’t have it, it was my dad’s.”
“You can’t have it,” she said, imitating his speech. She kept on dangling the jacket, coaxing him.

“Give us it!” he yelled.

She walked away, dragging the coat through the gutter towards the pub. When she arrived, she shouted back to Ryan. “Go back to your humpy in the hills, you little retard.”

The people around her laughed. He could hear his name being tossed around the group. One of the boys put his arm around her. They were all looking and laughing now, and the laughter came in loud volleys like gunfire across the street.

*

Later, when Ryan got home, he skinned and gutted the rabbits by the Datsun’s headlights and hung the carcasses in the meat cupboard at the back of the house. He washed his bloodied hands under the tap at the tankstand, shucked off his boots and went inside.

He lived with his grandmother in old shearer’s quarters set among the outbuildings of a sheep station where his father once worked. The building was made of fibro and clapboard with a flat tin roof, and was fenced off with hinge-joint wire and iron posts. His grandmother kept chickens and grew vegetables in the yard. There was one bedroom, a kitchenette, and a small living area. They paid no rent.

His grandmother was asleep on the couch, a half-knitted cardigan on her lap. A ball of wool had fallen and unspooled across the floor to the television, which played some British comedy; the characters, dressed in army clothes, spoke in riddles and told jokes that Ryan did not understand. He switched off the TV and the old woman stirred. She was wrinkled and gummy and there were all kinds of sores and discolourations on her legs and arms. She smacked her lips and rolled her tongue. “Did you get a bunny, love?” she said, not opening her eyes.

“Got a couple,” Ryan replied.

“Good boy.”

She struggled to her feet and limped off to the bedroom. “I’ll see you in the morning then,” she said.

“Okay, Nana.”

Ryan pulled out the mattress from behind the couch, spread the sheet and blanket, and lay down. He hadn’t eaten since lunch, but he didn’t feel hungry. His heart was beating hard and he still felt the anger move through his blood like venom.

*

Morning came grey and freezing. Ryan folded away the bed things and set out with an axe and a chaff bag to gather wood for the fire. On his way he saw the boss man emerge from the outhouse, hitching his trousers and notching his belt. He was a big man, the boss. He had a voice that carried across paddocks like hammer blows, and when there was some shindig in the homestead at night, some rowdy gathering of the town’s socialites, you could hear the boss man’s voice, his opinions and his cursing and his laughter, loud above the din.

The big man now stood with his arms cocked on his hips and eyed Ryan as if the boy was some strange animal, lurking, wild, and he snorted and spat and strode up the steps into his big house. Smoke from the homestead chimney drifted in the still air, and Ryan wondered what was on their breakfast table. He continued on down the stock path to the wooded stretch by the river.

He half filled the bag with split stumps and kindling and lugged it back up the hill. On his way he saw a black man—one of the workers—trudging across the frosty grass of the lambing paddock carrying fence posts and a coil of wire. Ryan stopped and watched him until he disappeared over the hill. He stood there in the cold and thought about his father’s calloused hands, the smell of tobacco on his flannel shirt. He remembered the day he had died, watching him walk across a paddock, this paddock, carrying wire to mend a fence.

Ryan walked through the yard and into the cottage where his grandmother, wrapped in a grey blanket, stood by the stove stirring oats.

Ryan did his morning chores. He pegged the skins, smoked the meat, and fed the chickens; and in the afternoon he drove to town with a box of fox skins and a grocery list from his grandmother.

*

The town was quiet for a Saturday. The oval was empty, the Yowies probably away to the Coonamble Bears, getting flogged. He parked outside the CWA hall, across from the grandstand, and went in carrying the skins.

The craft stall was set up in the far corner of the hall. According to his grandmother, long before his time, when the town was twice as big and all the mills were operating, the old hall held barn dances and balls, and the Paddies from the mill would play in a folk band up on stage, and the broad wooden floor would bend under hundreds of stomping feet. But its main purpose now was the Saturday craft stall run by the ladies of the Baradine CWA.

Judy Colwell, a small fidgety woman who spoke in tones of worry and complaint, was manning the stall. She stood behind the bench sorting woollens and stacking jam jars, and when she saw Ryan walking across the floor she began to shake her head. Two women admiring a cream doily at the far end of the stall stopped their conversation as Ryan placed his box on the edge of the bench.

“I can’t take any more,” Judy said. “I haven’t sold the last lot. The skins just don’t sell.”

“But I got Nana to stitch some into a rug this time,” Ryan said.

“They’re not selling. Nobody wants them,” Judy said.

The two women watching wore identical broaches on their cardigans. The broaches were in the shape of small wooden birds with marbles glued on for eyes. There was a row of them laid out on the table. Both women were large and red-faced and Ryan could smell the sugar in their blood.

“But Nana’s made them into a rug. I can show you,” Ryan said.

“No, don’t bother.”

One of the women made a clicking sound with her tongue. Ryan looked along the table at the produce. “How much for them bed-socks?” he said.

“Five dollars, or two pair for nine,” Judy said.

Ryan nodded, scratched his chin. “And what about them lacy things there?”

“Five dollars also.”

“I see,” Ryan said. “Do you sell many of them?”

“Some. Quite a few from time to time.”

“That’s because they’re on the table.”

“Pardon?”

“Maybe you’d sell my skins if you put them on the table. People might see them, might want to buy them. But you haven’t put them on the table.”

Judy looked down at the jam jars and rubbed her thumb across a label. “Nobody wants your skins, Ryan,” she said. “Sorry.”

“And Nana’s stuff’s not here, either.”

Judy didn’t reply. Ryan looked at the women. “She was good at this stuff, Nana was,” he said, pointing at the table. “Knitting, sewing, crochet. She still is pretty good, you know.” He picked up his box and walked towards door, his boot-stomp on the floorboards echoing in the big hall.

He drove along the main street towards the service station. A few cars were angle parked on the drag. Three blokes under big hats were talking with their arms folded, and a cattle dog tied to a nearby ute started barking. The publican was hosing down the footpath outside the Royal Hotel and watched Ryan as he drove by. He stepped out onto the road with his hose aimed at the gutter, his eyes on Ryan, and Ryan looked back, craning his head out the window as he went, wondering what the fuck.

At the servo he pumped in ten dollars of BP leaded, cleaned the windscreen of insect muck with the wet rag from the bucket by the bowser, and went in to pay.

Rodney was smoking a cigarette, talking on the phone. He wore filthy overalls and had an unlit smoke behind his ear. His forehead wrinkled up with some kind of news he was getting down the line. He nodded as Ryan slid a ten-dollar bill across the counter. Rodney put the money into the pocket of his overalls and turned towards the window. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He was shaking his head, looking out at the fuel bay, and a long curl of ash from his cigarette spilled onto the counter. He plucked the fresh smoke from his ear and lit it from the butt of the spent one. “Where’d they find her?” he said.

Ryan lingered, hoping for a chat, a bit of gossip, maybe talk guns and game, but Rodney stayed on the phone, sucking hard on the smoke, his face tight with concern. He looked at Ryan, seemed to look right through him as he listened, and then turned back to the window, his head still shaking. Ryan walked slowly out, and as he went he heard Rodney exhale smoke and whisper, “Jesus Christ almighty.”

*

It was midday. The fog had burned off and Ryan could see clear across the valley to the ranges where great domes of volcanic rock shone orange in the low winter sun. He drove by the Royal where the publican stood under the veranda coiling the hose over a cocked elbow, the bastard still staring. Further on, Ryan noticed two Dubbo squad cars parked next to Terry’s paddy-van out front of the cop shop. The town seemed very quiet.

He stopped to buy groceries, and when he came back out he saw a policeman with a clipboard looking at the Datsun, taking notes. Bill Heflan’s pig truck was parked nearby and Ryan quickly hid behind it. He watched the cop through the slats of the stock crate. Half-a-dozen porkers were rooting about in the hay on the trailer floor, all wound up from the rough ride in from Bill’s place, marching too and fro, and Ryan had to shift about to see what the cop was doing. He was Dubbo police—a big-gutted walloper with leather boots and a thick moustache. The cop picked up a ball of orange twine and threw it aside and ran his hand along the base of the tray and inspected his finger, flicking off some dry matter. He made notes. A radio crackled from the squad car parked across the street. The cop peered through the window of the Datsun, his hands cupped to his eyes, the clipboard tucked under his arm. He did the same from the other side and made more notes. He ran his hand along the front fender. He got down on his haunches and looked under the chassis. He picked up the chaff bag where Ryan kept the fox skins and looked inside. He closed it and then took another look. He put it back and ran his hand along the tray again and sniffed his finger. He made more notes. Ryan watched him from behind Bill Heflan’s pig truck with the blood beating in his ears and the taste of metal in his mouth, and the pigs were squealing and pissing and stomping their trotters on the mesh floor.

The cop walked across the road and tossed the clipboard on the dash of the car and came back, rubbing his gut. He took off his hat and went into the grocery store. Ryan picked up his groceries and made for the Datsun. He put the box on the passenger seat and as he went round to the driver’s door he looked in the tray. There was a foot-wide stain of dried blood in the centre where he’d put the shot rabbits, and marks around the perimeter where the cop had scratched with his finger. Ryan got in and drove away.

He was out of town on the bitumen road, approaching the turnoff for home, when he saw in the rear-view mirror the flashing lights crest the ridge. He slowed, flicked on the indicator, and checked the mirror again. The police car was half a kilometre behind. Ryan looked ahead to where the road disappeared into the trees, and beyond where the scrub lay across the folds of country like a blanket, and he was drawn to it. He needed to be out there in it, alone. He needed to be safe. He pressed the pedal to the floor and the Datsun shot off the blacktop and onto the sand and gravel of the Number One Break.

He was sliding all over the road, rattling over corrugations, and the squad car was already up in his dust, moving closer. Ryan broadsided off the big road onto a log track and checked the mirror again. The cop overshot the turn. Ryan waited, watching the dust settle, his foot hovering the pedal.

“The fuck’s going on?” he said.

The cop backed up through the falling dust and Ryan dropped the clutch and stomped on the accelerator. He took a bend and then another and found himself on a rut road skirting a ridgeline. Sticks and gum saplings between the wheel tracks slapped the front fender, and the side mirrors smashed against low branches of the scrub. There was no sign of the cop.

Ryan’s hands felt slippery on the wheel. “Idiot,” he said to himself, and slammed his elbow against the door and bit down hard on his bunched knuckles. “The fuck you running from?”

He came to a junction and turned onto a steep downhill track that zigzagged off the ridgeline. Ironbarks and spruce pines leaned in close at the edge, and there were rocks and fallen limbs in his path. He took random turns, left and right, and had no idea where he was or which direction he was headed.

And then up ahead, coming towards him, was the police car. It stopped, both doors flung open. The big Dubbo walloper and Kenny the local sergeant, hands on their weapons, knees bent. Ryan hit the brakes. There was no way back. He got out and ran.

Downhill through the scrub he went, running for his life, running like an animal smashing through the forest, fleeing in blind fear. He ran till he was jolted by level ground and then he stopped and turned and sucked in air. The sun caught the glint of a windscreen moving slowly along the ridgeline and there was the sound of sticks snapping halfway down the hill. Ryan went on, jogging now.

He came out into a clearing and saw the rabbit burrows, and on the far side was the toppled gum from where he had shot from the evening before. He skirted the perimeter and lay down in the small hollow at the base of the dead tree. His breath was laboured, it came rattling out of him, quick and painful, and he felt very thirsty. There were cuts all over his arms and a dull pain had set into his left ankle. He reached down and felt the swelling through his sock.

Ryan looked across the clearing and saw the Dubbo cop come out from the trees, radio to mouth, pistol drawn. Behind him, unseen through the scrub, a vehicle skidded to a stop. He heard doors open and slam. There were voices coming from two directions now, some shouting. There was a voice on a megaphone, saying his name, shouting into the thing. Ryan Wallace! Ryan Wallace! How strange, his name barked out loud in the quiet forest. How strange that they would know it. Ryan Wallace: mumbling dropout, bastard child, orphan from the hills.

He got up and ran, busting through litter and debris, over logs and gullies, blind, terrified. He heard the shouts of running men, honing in. His feet bogged in sand and he stumbled, and then there was a violent slap, quick and metallic. Ryan fell and the pain shot up from his ankle. He screamed through the leaves and muck piled around his face. Looking down he saw the trap biting deep into the flesh above his boot, the trouser cuff wet with dark blood. He reached for it and tried to prise open the jaws but they were jammed tight into his leg. He crawled forward and the chain went tight at the anchor and the rusty trap clawed into the bone. He reached for it again but was slammed to the ground by the butt of a rifle. The light turned gold for a moment and then brilliant white. He was flat on the ground, heaving for air, and the policeman’s boot pressed hard into his face. Ryan could feel the boot-tread on his cheek. He could hear voices of breathless men, swearing, calling him names. Rapist, murderer, they said. And among the shouts he heard them say her name. Tracey Driscoll.

Ryan’s chest burned as he tried to shout down their claims, but his cries were mute—his mouth was jammed shut by the weight of the boot. He rolled his eyes and the forest tipped sideways, and the strength and resolve drained out of him. Let them say these things, he thought as he lay there. Let them call me names. They are just names. And names will keep falling off me like water.

Ryan moved his eyes across the ground. There, not two yards away, ensnared in the other trap, was a dead fox. Flies crawled around the blackened wound on its hind leg. Its fangs were bared, its mouth fixed into a snarl. One eye was open, glassy and lifeless, yet it appeared to look at him, into him. Ryan felt the boot press harder on his face. The cop said something but Ryan did not understand. There were other voices but they came in rolling grunts, strange, foreign. Ryan looked at the fox. Brother, he thought. Wild brother of the scrub. He could taste the dirt and twigs around his mouth, smell the violence in the air, the stench of power. He closed his eyes and waited for the forest to fall silent.

 

About the Author

Wayne Strudwick has had stories publishedin Quadrant, Famous Reporter, LiNQ Magazine and Verandah.

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